It seems like farmed fish should be more sustainable than wild caught fish, right? With wild caught,
there is the constant risk of by-catch. That's when you net some poor dolphin or something
in the process of trying to catch the fish that you're actually after. But even if your
aim is a hundred percent, no by-catch, there's still the problem that there are only so many
fish in the sea. There's only so many of them down there, and when they're gone, they're
gone.
With aquaculture, it's different. Generally, you're breeding fish that otherwise would
not have existed at all. Indeed, aquaculture probably has a very big and very positive
role to play in satisfying humanity's ever-growing appetite for animal protein. But, just because
the fish is farmed doesn't mean that it's sustainable. It depends on the fish, and it
depends on the fishery. If you're overwhelmed, like I am, this guy is here to help you.
"I would say I eat, in terms of my protein, almost exclusively seafood. That's how I got
into my career, is enjoying seafood as a child."
Tyler Isaac runs the aquaculture program at seafoodwatch.org. This is a tremendous public
service provided by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. Pretty much any aquatic animal
you might consider eating, they've got a page on it here, rating its sustainability. Isaac
handles ratings for farmed fish, and one of the first things he'll point out is that lots
of fish is farmed in natural waters. This is a picture of a salmon farm in Norway. All
you got standing between the salmon pens and the fjord, or whatever, is a big net. So,
fish poop, uneaten feed — it slips right through.
"It's oftentimes managed in such a way where those farms are sited, ideally, in deeper
sites with good water circulation, so most of those nutrients are effectively flushed."
But sometimes it's not, and there can be further problems — pathogens the fish may be carrying,
parasites, along with any drugs the farmer might be using to treat those problems. Those
also can just slip right through the net pen into the ecosystem where they can cause problems.
Also, fish escape, and if they're not a native species, or if they're carrying diseases,
they could really cause problems out there. In contrast, no fish escapes from Springcrest
Trout Farm in Union County, Pennsylvania. What's a rainbow trout going to do if it gets
out of the barn, hitchhike to Lewisburg? Have a nice dinner at Elizabeth's? Ask the waiter
if there's a stream in town he can stay at? Nah, that trout is going to stay in the secure
keeping of the Reed family, the fifth and sixth generations to farm in this Pennsylvania
valley. Their ancestors started with dairy cows.
"I think that they would be a little bit shocked and amazed to see that we have water running
into the old bank barn, but..."
The dad there, Dwayne — he first tried raising coho salmon in the barn when he was a much
younger man.
"So, he had the whole setup of the tanks, the fish. It unfortunately didn't work out
for him, so me and my siblings kind of nudged him to get trout. They're more of a native
fish. In my opinion, I think they taste a lot better."
Cora Reed, there, actually owns the little family fish business. She and her brother,
Clayton, hope to grow it into their main gig after they finish college, and from what I
understand from seafoodwatch.org, they're doing pretty much everything right. The water
they use comes from a pond, just up the ridge.
"The source of the spring, it's kind of fed through underground caverns in our limestone
cropping here, and as the water flows, it comes out from underneath the ground, travels
in a four-inch tube down to the barn..."
...and into these raceway tanks, so called because the water races through. If you circulate
your water really fast, you can keep a lot of fish healthy in a relatively small space.
They've got a couple thousand rainbow trout right now. They naturally poop a lot — the
fish, not the family — and where does that poop go?
"So, what we have here is sort of like a settling basin."
Water overflows the tank and goes into that basin under the floor. The manure settles
out, and they use that to fertilize their fields. The water goes into outdoor artificial
ponds where the trout live the middle phase of their lives. Eventually, this water will
go into a stream fed by the spring up the ridge — in other words, where it would have
flowed anyway.
"So, this pond was just used. We drain it out for about a year, so we can get rid of
bacteria, kind of let the pond dry up. So we will switch ponds, and we'll use that one
for next year."
Now, raising fish in tanks and ponds has its own problems, but the obvious advantage, from
an environmental standpoint, is you can control everything, and the government can regulate
what you're doing because your outflow is coming through a pipe — a pipe that an inspector
can get in front of and test, which is a thing that happens here in the US.
"Through the NPDES system, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, and they're
required to mitigate their nutrient loading or pollutant loading to the environment through
measuring their nitrogen, their phosphorus, et cetera. And if it's out of compliance,
then they need to remedy that, and so that's a lot easier to do with a tank or a pond when
there's a pipe..."
...in contrast to a net pen in the ocean, where there is no pipe to check. This is a
picture of a tuna pen, and I have no idea if this particular one is well-run or not.
What I do know is that some of the worst sustainability ratings ever bestowed by seafoodwatch.org
have been on farmed tuna, specifically ranched bluefin tuna. Ranched, in this context, does
not mean that the fish live on a ranch, moseying between the tumbleweeds as they graze. No,
ranched means that the producers are not actually breeding their own fish.
"It utilizes wild-captured bluefin tuna and then fattens them on the farm, and so that
scores very poorly for us, especially considering the conservation status of most bluefin tuna
stocks that are listed as endangered or critically endangered."
Yeah, not really what you think of when you think of farmed fish. This is why I try to
check seafoodwatch.org before I buy any fish and why I try to look really closely at product
labels, which is something I can do much more effectively with my glasses, from the sponsor
of this video, Warby Parker. Let me thank them for a sec. Don't worry, wildlife lovers.
There's no actual tortoise in these tortoiseshell frames I picked for my free at home try-on.
They're acetate, which is one reason why Warby Parker glasses last forever and start at just
$95. That includes the prescription lenses. Warby Parker provides exceptional vision care
in stores where you can also get eye exams, and of course, you can get contacts or glasses
online, starting with the five frames they will send you in a box, totally free, to try
on.
Yikes, too 90s. But that's the beauty of doing this at home by myself — I'm free to be
adventurous. Hey, it's almost the end of the year, and if you've got a health savings account
or something similar that you've got to use or lose, spend it on some prescription sunglasses,
or contacts, or regular glasses. Do me a favor — try five pairs at home for free with my
link in the description, warbyparker.com/ragusea. When you're done, you just slap on the prepaid
return label and drop them in the mail. Warbyparker.com/ragusea. Thank you, Warby Parker.
So anyway, ranched seafood is fish that they caught in the wild and then fattened up in
captivity. That's not always as bad as it sounds. Baby fish generally have very poor
survivability in the wild anyway, but yeah. It's generally better to breed your own fish.
Check out the little trout hatchery they're starting up at Springcrest Farm. It's in a
vintage clawfoot tub, because that's how you breed fish in style.
"The females, they come ready to spawn, and they start end of August in Pennsylvania.
August, September and October, the females will start to fill up with eggs. You harvest
the eggs from the females. It's just a matter of pushing on their abdominal and spitting
them into a bucket. Do the same thing to a male. Fertilize them, and then we put them
in this little incubator, and you can see in the incubator that it rolls the eggs gently.
It mimics a natural environment in a stream."
After a month, they get a little black eye on them. That's how you tell the difference
between fertilized and unfertilized eggs, the black eye. When the larva hatch, they
will spill out into the tub. They have a little yolk sac attached to them that feeds them
for about another month. After that, you got to feed them yourself, and that raises the
subject of feed. You can have the most sustainable fishery in the world, but how sustainable
is the fishery where you get your fish food from?
Like a lot of fish farms, the folks at Springcrest have found that their fish do best on a feed
made with real fish byproduct in it. Trout eat other fish in the wild. The Reed family
get their feed from a guy they know and trust, but some of the feed used in aquaculture is
not what you'd call sustainably sourced. In some cases, it's by-catch from the worst kind
of trolling that just scoops up everything in the ocean, but that is all changing.
"I would say the majority of most manufactured diets that are being fed to aquaculture species
— whether it's salmon, trout, tilapia, and even shrimp — is plants."
Or plants supplemented with fungus or maybe insect protein. This is a very recent paper
where scientists were able to raise rainbow trout on plant feed boosted with yeast and
bug protein. Without the right protein, the fish don't grow well, and they get diseases.
But yeah, the industry is looking for ways of feeding fish something other than other
fish.
"It's partly due to economics, partly due to sustainability pressures, but a shift from
using wild fish ingredients, like fish meal and fish oil, to using plant-based ingredients
— something like a soybean meal or soybean protein concentrate."
Here's some soy growing in that same valley as the trout farm in Pennsylvania. Apart from
considering what the farmer feeds the fish, you also have to consider what the fish do
with the food.
"There's a unit called a feed conversion ratio, how much feed is required to turn into a unit
of biomass or fish. With ranched bluefin tuna, they're not using manufactured feeds in almost
every case. They're using whole bait fish that have either been frozen or are fresh,
and feed conversion ratio of at least 10-, 12-, sometimes even 25-to-one..."
That means you have to give the tuna 25 kilos of food to produce one kilo of tuna — a
25-to-one conversion ratio. You're not just consuming the fish — you're consuming all
the fish the fish consumed. In contrast, beef cattle generally have a six-to-one feed conversion
ratio, here in the U.S. With chicken, it's down to almost a one-to-one ratio, and rainbow
trout is down around there, too. How do you know which species have good feed conversion?
Well, you check seafoodwatch.org, but it also helps to think low on the food chain. Instead
of eating top predators, like bluefin, eat lowly filter feeders, like muscles. Check
out how they farm muscles. They'll do it on these long chains right off the coast. Nothing
touches the bottom and messes it up.
"Broadly, yes, shellfish and seaweed farms are great for the environment. They can be
even regenerative and help restore that ecosystem."
This is a time lapse uploaded by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The Chesapeake is this sadly
abused estuary on the East Coast of the United States near Washington. But anyway, this video
shows oysters cleaning the bay. We humans dump an excess of nutrients into coastal waters,
mostly farm runoff. These nutrients feed an overpopulation of microorganisms that cause
all kinds of environmental problems. Bivalves, like oysters — they eat these excess phytoplankton
and algae right out of the water, and then, in some cases, we can eat them. It's a win-win.
But, just because a fish is farmed and it's low on the food chain, that still doesn't
necessarily mean that it's sustainable. An unfortunate example would be shrimp from a
few areas of concern around the world, one being parts of Southeast Asia.
"It's an industry that's dominated by smallholder farmers that don't have a lot of access to
capital. They're under particular pressure to produce shrimp and make money, and so that
can result in things like higher stocking densities than you might normally advise,
which can result in things like elevated nutrients being discharged. When you have those elevated
stocking densities, it's a lot easier for disease to proliferate, and you might see
treatments with something like an antibiotic to treat a bacterial disease in a shrimp pond,
because otherwise, that shrimp farmer is not going to have a crop to sell and doesn't have
any money. Right?
And then there's the human rights abuses — well-documented cases of slave labor in the Southeast Asian
shrimp industry. Do you feel like you can keep up with such things? Neither do I, which
is why I love the folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and I try to check seafoodwatch.org
before I buy any aquatic animal to eat. They consider all kinds of things we didn't even
have time to talk about here, like is the farmer killing huge flocks of birds to keep
them from eating the fish? That's a decoy at Springcrest Farm. Also, note the steep
sides of the ponds.
"Yeah. We keep them so steep so no birds or predators can get in and just eat the fish."
But you can eat them, if you live around Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. They really do supply fish to
Elizabeth's. Ooo, trout with caponata — that's a Sicilian ratatouille. You can also just
show up to the barn and get fish. That's what my dad does. Hey, dad. They'll filet some
for you if you want. The trimmings go to the cats. That's a well-fed cat right there. Dad
just does them under what Brits call a grill — a little butter and lemon, very nice.
Trout is basically freshwater salmon, and before someone comments that salmon are freshwater
salmon, just know that, A) I don't like you, and B) Most salmon live the middle part of
their lives in the ocean, so they taste way fishier than trout. Anyway, to make something
very clear, Warby Parker is the sponsor of this video. The aquarium did not give me money
to push their website. They're a non-profit, and they're doing work that I want to support,
same deal with the trout farm. Though, they are not a non-profit, and I can only hope
the market will reward young people who want to raise fish the right way. Cora is studying
business at Penn State. Clayton is getting into hydrology.
"Right now, we're possibly doing, what, 20 fish a week?"
"Yeah."
"If we could get up to maybe 200 to 500 fish a week, that'd be a pretty solid income for
both of us, I'd say."
"Yeah."
Make it happen, captain. I'll take the first 200 — I got a big freezer.